A vicious life wrapped around symbols. What is the thing I want to tell you the reader is the same question as who am I as how do you want your daughter to remember you. A litany. As someone who taught her the courage to live as she wanted is the same as you as the clay won’t harden in such conditions is the same as grow. As the burning u-shaped chassis of the Volkswagen Jetta is to the tree. As hair-covered arms covered in ants. Develop love. Stick to it. What I know. Like white snow. Volcano is no volcano. The greater eyes retain you over man’s laws. And they’ve advanced to the point where you’re convinced you don’t remember the brand: Philip K. Dick. Nam June Paik. Open Mike Eagle. Donald Trump. Valentino Rossi. And more. On this week’s. Meet the Nation. [APPLAUSE] [HOLD FOR APPLAUSE] [HOLD APPLESAUCE FOR APPLAUSE] All art is taste. False. All taste is broke. False. The moment you call him divine. True. Red is blue / a wire monkey, / too. Remember that, Maeve? Syntax. In whose hand? Cheating. A projection. It’s sad the things you remember. My aunt’s hand. Why now? Wow. Disney laid hands. I’m afraid to reach out. Don’t be. Brown cow. And slowly cold rain in hair.
the tide dropped out while still enrolled puta in the sun scared moon certainly not the heroes darkly begging at the shore’s feet taking advantage the only thing at which they’ve excelled no other way to get it done their shoulder / your shoulder their back / your back the chorus unable to prove anything anymore distracted by distraction comparing work to worry reaction to action syrup to syntax the anti-war movement of the ’60s and ’70s sabotaged the culture their heroes heathens lords of dew acknowledge the abusive sutra turned themselves out there’s hero shit in the street and no one picks it up which is to say everyone refuses to pick it up who precisely is this no one and are you looking for agency representation?
i don’t want to hate read your big bang which is to say i desire to sniff your every sip of coke carry you closer to the end of beer of coffee of water i am formally interesting of but bereft baked into obsolescence the right hand no poems about rain when i drive the scents enter and exit like coffee shop customers once a virgin always a virgin no leatherback sea turtle devouring a jellyfish have a strange obsession strangely unobsessed i was a bad translator and a hell of a stylist trapped in colin powell’s test tube not being dramatic when i say the light dims vibrating elements start a tv network arch of river-wet stones above creek in vermont if you don’t know the noun its sentence is alien and uber modernity says don’t slow america morphs individual identity to bludgeon america grafts vision to formula warmachine america was nowhere america had nowhere
answer the call humankind lin the shadow of calamity ganon rises over the ashes of hyrule gers unregenerately in plato’s cave still reveling its craft your survival age-old habit in defend the legend mere images of basic reading ability is needed to fully enjoy this game the truth but being educated by photographs is not like being fantasy violence educated by mild suggestive themes older more artisanal use of alcohol images for one breath
listen, monster, i’m here to remind you the ruby drunk caught in your throat demands a buck fifty for the downtown 1 white shoe slip-resistant rubber sole the plan
this Philosophy smells of studded club soda dark liquor hidden deep in books template matching over styx russian sub ice cream necropolis kicks filthy nooks
oh no i hope it’s not true i’m attached to the colors posing at piss station so unsophisticated my tenses fall to the floor i’ve missed my choo choo
you don’t deserve a narrative monster all you get: a spare admission of form
like a dog like a man who can’t decide whether to use the pronoun him or it dog who’s spoiled interior design three heads one asshole no one to love it
michel foucault would have been an iphone man bald bitmoji man he would have sucked off zuck in the castro like a real man unable to look anywhere but in
retrospect is fabulism is a surrealist koan yodeled from buckling knees in a space station manned by paranoid belted purple unfathomable beasts
ignorant to our own intricate dance i am not a love song i‘m a baked yam
rich fucks poor schmucks grey donkeys pink goats loser communist cattle roaming cocks black pig
gnaws vestigial arm of long-dead stump pink pig dreams of shit in dry sun
all pant in red heat zoo as palace of great social inequity lonesome horse shreds grass
beside canada goose both children enamored in their wielding
large white girl swings twig black girl arcs storybook of freckles red polka dots
on tawny field of mask skipping mirrors through corridor of meat two indian condors fuck in nearby cage
and insignificant small brown deer neither getting their money’s worth older schmucks inarticulately elsewearing
zoo — $6 a head— equalizes even verbs animals people objects subjects as commercial rents plummet
dirt everyone fucked and fucking sun and moon penetrate sky kiss asphalt i go back where i came from
play volleyball with colombian neighbors i go home to america feel lonesome as stars
imagine america and hang cheap black tarp like flag with expensive steel clamps
over and over
union made folding in america where wind is ideal and idea and erase myself between parked cars
another picture made with shitty attitude fueled by quarter crackers
we feed one another from vicious passive hands
release fang fur leather feather plate-mail instinct river bloat low medicine white phosphorus art school upheaval
In a Photograph of Heaven
cold floorboards creak and broken feet labor, yr
tiny vertebrae at arms fingertips asleep on a giant’s shoulder, my
one hand raking its grave across her back taut guiltless guileless unwalking preverbal, yr
the object holds fear her out there like just her out there with the fulsome dogs of envy, my
wrapping themselves in wallpaper and music and great ambiguous hurdles that jump jump jump over trees canals and land on a better partner who tells himself the day’s failures remain, okay, yr
that when one sits down to analyze their respective scroll everything beneath our feet, vulgar back catalog, mines and thines
bedrock rot head-in-the-clouds metaphor head-in-the-sand metaphor she cleaves the fall harvest at winter’s end
The Race to Fire Island Lighthouse
hey, listen i want to explain it to you the difficulty of love curled up like a roach ‘s obvious hunger sense organs engaged and something like a heavy-lidded lighthouse lying grandiloquent on its side elbows sore forearms sore my exercise anymore to soften desperation melts that selfsame bedrock
do you understand the line through love and pest and lighthouse i’m snorting a lexapro with you in this zoo
beauty bubbles up like a distraction desperate not for good genes we’re all needled scaled or broadleafed nor unabashed of scholarship and easy love hidden in history
reader, when i’m gone tell her how quickly the tunnel nootka was built
how direct its line from here to there a plurality of good intentions some heartbreak ‘s unavoidable but not too much that she’ll come to understand as mere fact like a new crime the prosecutor says
dig a little in the dirt
the ear the chin the crown of the head missing uncombed not as wild as any newborn mind pull back a meter stop digging the prosecutor says gun badge law degree and no sense of aesthetic pride
reveals some pretty incriminating things the truth isn’t the best way to get a bad actor off a clean street
i am not a fan of creation neither nor perpetuated myth it is what it is it is until the skin burns the maps draw themselves and murderers prop up little books of poetry a little knuckle a little knee a choice to remove the lighthouse debris i abide the law with a straight spine from space presumably hemmed in by caught-shadow i remember her face as it dances across every unknowable constellation of beauty
When I write The girl is dying I do not mean to enter the girl nor deconstruct her state of abstract goingness.
It’s a figure beyond an open window in a time of plague.
Disemboweled skywriting or the family name forgotten in water.
Which is to say: Vicious mercy becomes the uncountable gallop of the ruddy horse forging the sandy horizon.
Let the creature offenses stand in beauty among their rare pigments.
Honeycut, should I fail to mention light — What kind of poet is this? — but here!
Look!
Cherry and evergreen ring the moon like a bell unrung, you see them or don’t.
These next few moments of balance determine your eligibility for brief happiness.
Remember first to crucify the middle-ground; translucent, gathered up, mercurial, for modernity.
Mobility.
Into sun-sucked ink, oil, platinum, I vandalize form.
You, widely recognized as a modular prophet, briefly part the asbestos curtain.
Who, among these long-ago minted currencies, profits from the quietus of pulped paupers?
Ultramarine, of course, picked up and deposited here at my feet like seed, forms the reticulated reach of your life.
They do.
When they’re gone they’re gone.
Something else, especially if this chaotic rest goes unexamined.
Time lays a recursive trap in which most get caught.
From the Old English for eye-hole.
The skin that threatens to scream in from its triangular sleep, vanishing from the fog of natural history, just as quickly as it had long-ago been shed.
You suddenly appear vaulted and the sun is beautiful.
My favorite spot across the entire desert.
I am describing the man who offers the creature, spoken into long-to-go life, a bucket of sewing needles.
Mostly I see your bones and saddle.
Faithful reader, a sharp splash of light on the cheek come, potential space for potential space.
